23 October 2012 5:56 PM

There have been some developments recently in our understanding of the various prejudices which deface our society.

Some people may have difficulty in keeping up.
I am producing a guide to help the confused, available in print and as a e-book, which will go on the market as a Christmas alternative to all those pub and restaurant handbooks.

For those who can’t wait, here is a taste of the 2013 Isms Guide.
Racism: Frankie Boyle is not racist, even though he used the foulest racial insults as part of a professional comic act. Mr Boyle is an anti-racist, and he was using the terms ironically, to expose the real racists.
I hope you understand this, because the Mirror didn’t and it has cost them the thick end of £55,000.

John Terry is reported to be happy to wear an armband saying ‘Unite Against Racism’. Mr Terry has not been caught using the kind of filthy term which Mr Boyle employed in his jokes. He used the word ‘black’, which was about the only printable one in a volley of abuse directed at opposition player Anton Ferdinand during a Premier League match last year.
Terry has been fined around half a million pounds in all by his club and the FA over the incident.

He’ll probably feel it less than the Mirror will be hurt by losing a sum 10 times smaller.
The anti-racists in football are now the ones who refuse to wear FA approved anti-racist shirts.

Yes, I know, but that is why you need informed guidance, and a good lawyer, to keep up with correct behaviour.
Anton Ferdinand’s brother Rio, who is among the shirt refuseniks, is reported to be planning a breakaway union for black footballers, to tackle discrimination in all forms.

When I first heard I thought perhaps the right to membership would be decided on the qualifications once enshrined in law in places like apartheid South Africa or old Mississippi, where the most minute examination of your family descent would be carried out to decide where you stood in the racial hierarchy. Such methods have become unfashionable, except among British social workers who use them to determine who can adopt a child.

Nothing so crude for Mr Ferdinand, however. You will get your party card – sorry, membership of the Federation of Black Players – whatever background you come from, so long as you ‘share a desire to combat racism in English football.’
I look forward to finding out how you are supposed to establish your desire to combat racism in English football. By not wearing a Kick It Out shirt or a Unite Against Racism armband, perhaps?

Mr Ferdinand is said to want to defend the young players targeted by vicious, depressing and dismal racial abuse in an under-21 match in Serbia this month. A noble aim. There is, however, some distance between Serbia and Shepherd’s Bush.

The last time I was in Belgrade, there was a Serb army shelling the hell out of their Muslim neighbours in Sarajevo. Even the Serbs have advanced a little bit.
Sexism: The failure of companies to put more women in senior jobs is proof that women suffer terrible discrimination.

The Guardian reported this month that the lack of female by-lines on newspaper front pages was more evidence of the same.
I would complain to my line manager about this, but I don’t think I’d get anywhere. She’s just another reactionary dinosaur.
It is not sexist to abuse hundreds of vulnerable young women, including hospital patients, if you have enough status at the BBC.

It was not sexist for BBC managers to ignore the victims, until this month.
Disability: It is unsavoury, plain nasty, and probably a criminal offence to tell horrid jokes about disabled people. Unless you are Frankie Boyle, when it is ‘celebratory’.

Ageism: It is important to show respect for the dignity of elderly people. All professional bodies, charities and campaign groups will tell you this. However, it is also fine for doctors to draw up quotas of older people for inclusion in ‘end of life care’ registers, for purposes that remain less than entirely clear.

The registers are secret from patients, probably because they might provoke protests, which would be undignified.
Privacy: Human rights require that famous men are shielded from prurient media interest in their unorthodox sex lives. Phone hacking was an awful crime, so bad that we must have a fresh set of laws to ban it twice.

We must make sure that we never again have an aggressive and unrestrained Sunday newspaper prepared to use criminal methods like phone hacking to profit from the unjustifiable public appetite for information about the entirely private lives of celebrities like, for example, Jimmy Savile.

Homophobia: A guest house owner who barred a gay couple from a double room on the grounds that they were not married has lost her case.
Funny thing, though. After the case, the losing B&B owners came flying to the defence of the gay couple concerned, who had been singled out for some brutish social media attention from the knuckle-dragging thugs of a far right organisation. They drew a contrast between the behaviour of the British National Party and the ‘polite and reasonable’ way in which both sides had conducted the B&B dispute.

Then there’s Peter Tatchell, time-honoured voice of gay radicalism, sharing a platform with the Christian Institute, determined evangelists against everything on the gay rights agenda.
Both sides want legal reforms to restore our traditional right to insult each other and to repeal the overbearing Section Five of the 1986 Public Order Act, the law that makes an insult a crime.

Perhaps all is not lost, just yet. We might even get a return to sanity, if only John Terry and Rio Ferdinand could be persuaded to join them.

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17 October 2012 7:02 PM

Dominic Grieve is a cautious
politician, and never forgets that he is by trade a lawyer. Because of this
examples of Mr Grieve contradicting the decisions of the courts are rare.

I think it safe
to say that to overrule the 200-page determination of a High Court judge on a
constitutional matter is something that outrages every inclination in Mr
Grieve’s soul.

But the Attorney
General’s decision to let Prince Charles off the hook over his black spider
letters to ministers is a blatant slap to Mr Justice Walker and his two fellow
jurists who led the long-running and exhaustive letters-to-ministers case.

Mr Justice
Walker said the Prince’s letters went outside his constitutional privileges and
were no part of his training for monarchy. Mr Grieve now says they were ‘an
important means by which the Prince of Wales prepares for kingship.’

The judge said
Charles was acting just like any other lobbyist. The letters, Mr Justice Walker
ruled, should be published so that people can find out what the powerful are
getting up to behind the scenes.

Mr Grieve, by
contrast, says the Prince is ‘party-political neutral’ and he must not be
inhibited from expressing his views candidly and frankly. His ability to engage
with the government of the day and maintain political neutrality is a
cornerstone of the UK’s constitutional framework, the Attorney General added.

That phrase
reminds me of the scene in Pulp Fiction where the assassin assures his victims
that the hamburgers they are eating are the cornerstone of any nutritious
breakfast, and then kills them all.

I don’t think Mr
Grieve means what he says about a cornerstone of the constitution either. I
think his words are meant mainly to intimidate, and he has another purpose in
mind entirely.

What Mr
Grieve is trying to do is to save the Prince of Wales from himself.

There are enough
clues buried in his explanation of his decision to suppress Charles’ letters.
How about this one: ‘It is highly important that he is not considered by the
public to favour one political party or another.

‘The risk will
arise if, through these letters, the Prince of Wales was viewed by others as
disagreeing with government policy. Any such perception would be seriously
damaging to his role as future monarch, because if he forfeits his position of
political neutrality as heir to the throne, he cannot easily recover it when he
is king.’

Charles’ problem
is he thinks he knows best, and cannot resist using his clout to try to get his
way. We all know the examples, from the environment through grey goo to
architecture. In this area alone his recent use of royal connections to block a
£3 billion development in Chelsea is exactly the sort of thing that could
backfire very badly.

He has got away
with it so far. He will not get away with it as king.

It is as
clear as it can be that during her long reign, the Queen has rarely if ever
gone beyond her constitutional duty to be consulted and to warn and encourage
ministers. But imagine if she had.

What would have
happened to the popularity and status of the monarchy if she had tried to
impose her views, whatever they may have been, during the Suez crisis? The Cuba
missile crisis? Rhodesian UDI? The Falklands war? The invasion of Iraq?

Let’s come home.
Would we have been better off if the Queen had tried to sway the Government and
the electorate to her point of view over joining the EEC, or Margaret
Thatcher’s economic policies, or any number of industrial disputes from
Grunwick to Wapping? Would it have helped if the Queen had announced that the
country should be doing more to exploit its coal reserves in the middle of
Arthur Scargill’s great strike?

There was,
in fact, an attempt to paint the Queen as deeply upset by Thatcherite
economics, but it never really stuck. Nor is she harmed by the recent
disclosure of her views on Abu Hamza by a foot-in-mouth BBC correspondent.
Everyone knows it was merely the betrayal of a private conversation and she had
no intention of influence-mongering.

Charles can’t
see this. He really seems to have failed to grasp that the licence which has
been extended to him during his long apprenticeship as Prince of Wales will not
be on offer to a monarch, and the public will not be grateful for the benefit
of his excellent opinions.

There is another
problem, which is the quality of Charles’ interventions into politics. We will
not for the foreseeable future be able to read the letters in the latest fuss,
but we know all about some of his earlier ones.

Some years ago
parts of his correspondence with then Lord Chancellor Lord Irvine happened to
cross my desk, on their way to being published. I don’t know who leaked them,
but it was fairly clear that Derry and Charles were not entranced with each
other.

Together with a
colleague, I had the task of going through Charles’ writings about the evils of
human rights laws to find the facts about the alleged incidents of which he
complained.

We found
nothing. Niet. Nada. Hard evidence to back the Prince’s claims: nil. It was as
if some bloke in the saloon bar had gone home and stuck his evening’s musings
down in green ink and posted them off to Derry.

Only since
this bloke was the Prince of Wales, Derry had to take them seriously, as have
scores of other ministers since.

The
implication is that the Prince of Wales is not only a top-of-the-range
entitlement bunny, convinced that he is more important than everybody else and
his views must be treated accordingly. He may also be a fool.

For the sake of
the future of the monarchy, we can only hope not. For today, it looks as if
Dominic Grieve is giving Charles a serious warning. This is a yellow card for
the Prince.

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12 October 2012 6:56 PM

We have heard an awful lot about the suffering of people who bear terrible afflictions or disabilities and who wish to die. We have heard very little about the desperately sick who want to live, and the families who stand by them in hope.

It has been based around a brilliantly conceived series of legal cases in which the judiciary have been presented with deeply affecting hard cases. Each one has asked for a modest legal concession, usually involving human rights and the 1961 law that makes helping with a suicide a serious crime.

The individuals who have brought these cases are sometimes merely sympathetic and at others pitiable, as in the recent instance of Tony Nicklinson, the 58-year-old victim of 'locked-in syndrome' who lost his call for help from his doctor to die in the High Court in August. Mr Nicklinson died a few days after his legal defeat.

Occasionally the legal campaigns have scored successes. The most notable was that of multiple sclerosis sufferer Debbie Purdy, who persuaded the Law Lords that the Director of Public Prosecutions should provide guidance on whether her husband might face prosecution for assisted suicide, were he to help her travel to the Dignitas clinic in Zurich to die.

As a result of the Purdy case, DPP Keir Starmer QC introduced rules on assisted dying prosecutions that mean no-one is likely to be prosecuted, with the risk of a 14-year-jail term, if they help in the death of someone who is a suffering relative or friend, and if they act out of compassion rather than malice or greed.

However you paint it, this is a major change in the law as set down by Parliament, a law which takes no account of the motives of the individual aiding and abetting the suicide.

Indeed, Mr Starmer has brought no prosecutions against anybody from the trail of stricken families who have helped members travel to Switzerland to die.

What is interesting is that, despite all the campaigning, all the high-profile court cases, all the BBC interviews, all the endless hand-wringing about the cruelty of keeping those who are suffering alive against their will, few people seem to want to take advantage of the new right to die.

We do not have very recent figures, but I would guess that no more than 200 British people have died at Dignitas since the clinic became well-known here in 2003.

It is a number small enough to raise the question of how big, really, is the demand for assisted dying?

The campaign for assisted dying has certainly been effective in influencing care of the incapacitated in the Health Service.

It was surely a factor in the successful passage of the Mental Capacity Act, pushed through by Lord Falconer in the teeth of a rebellion by backbench Labour MPs, which gave legal status to living wills. These mean people can leave orders for their doctors to kill them by withdrawing nourishment and fluid by tube if they become too sick to speak for themselves.

The assisted dying campaign formed the background to the introduction of the Liverpool Care Pathway into hospitals across the country. This, for those who have not noticed, is the system by which medical staff withdraw treatment from those judged to be close to death, in the cause of easing their passing. It often involves heavy sedation and the removal of nourishment and fluid tubes.

I do not wish to try to step into the shoes of those medical professionals and care workers who deal every day with people at the extreme end of life and in the depths of the worst illnesses. I have no qualifications or knowledge to second guess their decisions, and no intention of criticising those who work with great professionalism and compassion in jobs that are far beyond my capability.

But all the indications suggest there are many families who are unhappy with the way in which their relatives have died in hospitals, and that they are increasingly willing to complain about it.

Many of these people may be speaking out of misdirected grief. As one well-informed MP put it to me this week, very few expect a loved one who goes into hospital to die, but people do have the habit of dying. Some of those complaining may be troublemakers, some inspired by political or religious agendas.

Nevertheless there seem to be a lot of them. And they are not celebrities or legal grandees or Westminster faces. They are little people, people like you and me, not the kind you usually hear on the radio or see on the TV.

The courageous Professor Patrick Pullicino, the hospital consultant who defied the NHS consensus to speak out against the Liverpool Care Pathway this summer, reckoned it is used in around 130,000 deaths each year. That is a number that dwarfs the assisted dying lobby.

I think we are going to hear a lot more about the Liverpool Care Pathway, and I think the medical professions, the Department of Health, and a number of politicians are going to have to put some time into considering what has been happening.

It comes down to this: there are a lot of people who believe that, rather than trying to help their loved ones, hospitals have been keen to kill them off.

They believe that, while the assisted dying lobby has been parading in the courts and publicising itself on the BBC, assisted dying has quietly become a reality in our hospitals.

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10 October 2012 7:19 PM

I think my conference speech went down rather well, but unfortunately it has been largely ignored by the media, who have preferred to trail around after an overblown town hall bigwig with a talent for personality politics and not much grasp of detail.

Dave and I planned it in some detail as a programme for the Party to revive its popularity with the electorate in the 900-odd days between now and the next election. I will take this opportunity to rehearse the main topics for those who were not in the hall and, unfathomably, were not given the chance to catch up by Sky News.

The NHS: I informed our colleagues and activists that, from now on, the NHS will not be safe with us.

We have conducted private polling in which, after the usual one about how much do you love the Health Service, we asked members of the public a follow-up question: why the hell did you say that?

This has produced results similar to those thrown up by our work on public attitudes to the welfare system, which has shown that 98 per cent of all people with jobs will stand up and applaud until their hands hurt when the first professional drug dealer is stripped of his sickness benefit.

Our findings indicate that 87 per cent of the public would operate on themselves with garden tools rather than spend a week on an NHS hospital ward, nine per cent would re-mortgage the house and go private, three per cent didn’t know, and one per cent were already in hospital and wanted a drink of water.

On the basis of the new polling, we intend to begin a fresh round of NHS reforms, which will convert the Health Service into a genuinely contributory health insurance system, on the lines set out by Tony Blair until he changed his mind in about May, 1997.

People who work and pay their state welfare insurance will be able to choose where to go for treatment, and taxpayers’ money will follow their choices.

GPs, nurses, consultants, hospital cleaners and district general managers will all have an incentive to treat patients with a little respect, because they will lose their jobs otherwise.

These reforms may prove a tough sell to some elements of the media. We will therefore need a special kind of politician to bulldoze them through. It will need to be someone with a populist touch, articulate, capable of using wit to put a gloss on complicated matters. The figure in question should also accept a peerage, in order to show that, while he or she is deeply loyal to the current Party leadership, his or her motivation is entirely above personal ambition and the daily political fray.

I have mentioned this to Dave and I believe he already has someone in mind.

Jimmy Savile: Concerns about the Savile scandal are now reaching a pitch where we need to do something about it.

We will call a judicial inquiry into the culture, practice and ethics of the BBC. It will examine how child abuse came to be an everyday pastime for some entertainers and their assistants.

The inquiry will be wide-ranging, and cover not just the alleged long-term sexual violence of some star presenters, sometimes on BBC premises, and the suppression of news about it, but other elements of BBC reporting that may not have been fully in the public interest.

Starting with the complete failure to notice that immigration was news; or to criticise the European Union, ever; or to question the indisputable truth that the planet is overheating, even though it isn’t.

The judge in charge will inquire into how Radio Three, once the best classical station in the world, was turned into one more chat and phone-in channel for half the day. It’s only surprising they didn’t give Savile a show on it.

The inquiry will run in tandem with the Metropolitan Police investigation, so Corporation staff and executives can expect to be dragged from their beds in dawn raids, which will be followed by 11 hours of intensive questioning about why they once wrote a memo suggesting Savile should get a walk-on part in Balamory.

One Nation: We cannot let Ed Miliband get away with stealing Disraeli’s clothes. We will therefore bring in Disraeli’s pioneering public health scheme, introduced in 1875 but which has somehow slipped out of use in recent years, under which local authorities are required to collect the bins from every household in their neighbourhood at least once a week.

We will welcome the Labour Party’s abandonment of multiculturalism and its espousal of imperialism, as practiced by Disraeli. We will however, question which Disraeli policy they will prioritise: the scramble for Africa or the reconquest of India?

Scotland: We have agreed with the Edinburgh administration the questions to be put in the independence referendum. There will be three: 1) Would you like to see an independent Scotland? 2) Would you like the union with England, Wales and Northern Ireland to continue? 3) Do you want to keep getting the money or not?

Europe: We will not be holding a referendum in which people will be asked whether or not they want to leave the European Union. Instead, we’re just going to quit. We will announce the decision to secede from the EU and start talks on a new free trade relationship about six weeks in advance of the election.

That ought to stuff Miliband. And as for Nick Clegg, the LibDems would have more chance of forming another coalition if they picked Jimmy Savile as their next leader.

04 October 2012 7:05 PM

I am looking for backers for
my film script, a touching story of a young girl’s dreams, the pop music
industry, and the undead.

It opens on a
grassy cliff edge in Yorkshire, where, overlooking the grey sea far below, is
the unusual grave of a recently deceased television presenter.

The
inscription on the strange tomb says the star, Sir Jerome Seville, has been
buried at a 45 degree angle so he can look out over the ocean. We watch as a
very young blonde in a floaty white dress trips lightly up to the monument,
plucking a flower, and stops to read the legend.

Suddenly a
ghostly white hand shoots up from the ground, with three rings, a silver
bracelet, and a cigar. To a sudden burst of loud and satanic music, which goes
‘do you wanna be in my gang?’, it seizes blondie by the ankle and drags her
down, screaming.

Cut to an old
pub in the nearby haunted port of Whitby, where a sinister-looking group of gnarled
old DJs are gathered in a pub, surrounded by pentacles, big bunches of garlic,
and so on. We hear muttered remarks about ‘we never should have let her go’
before the door flies open and in marches a caped figure, preceded by a large
iron cross.

It is Professor
Van Persie, called in by Newsnight to find the evidence of evil that eluded its
own sleuths.

There is
silence. The Dutch hunter of vampires and phone hackers puts his face in front
of the chief old DJ, Phil Gambaccino, who is played by Brian Glover. ‘Someone’s
privacy has been invaded,’ he hisses, ‘and I am a stakeholder’.

I don’t want to
spoil the plot for you, but it’s going to be about a mother and her innocent
young daughter who longs to be famous. The mother is a survivor from a vampire
attack long ago, when she was a guest on a TV show that celebrated the
technology of the time, Jerome’ll Fax It.

She’ll be played
by Jenny Agutter of course, and we’ll get that blonde who was the suffragette
in Parade’s End to be the child in peril, to give it some tone.

The mother and
daughter try to escape on a train, but unfortunately someone has painted a sign
on the side in blood to tell the vampires where they are. It says Virgin in big
red scrawled letters.

A crowd of
flying fiends, who call themselves the Blood Thirst Group, attacks. The mother
is trapped by Sir Jerome in the buffet car. ‘You can’t take me,’ she cries,
‘I’m 48.’

‘No,’
replies the merciless vampire. ‘That is the age of the train.’

The soundtrack
will have lots of old child-centred rock records. There’ll be Chuck Berry’s
Memphis Tennessee, and that Randy Newman song that was in The Full Monty, when
nobody noticed the verse about how suspicious minds say our love is wrong.

Perhaps we’ll
have the one Sir Michael Jagger used to do about the 15-year-old. And her
friend.

I’m struggling
with the casting for Sir Jerome. We need a comic talent, I think, but he has to
look the part and give the audience a genuine fright. I’ll call Steve Coogan.

The climax will
be in a TV studio where a large audience of attractive and youthful victims is
dancing at the recording of a programme, possibly called Pine Box Jury. The
singing star, Gerry Glamour, is a vampire. The producer, Jeremy Kong, is a vampire.
The Who have cancelled. Sir Jerome, the presenter, is waiting for the big
moment when they do the top 10, a section of the show known as The Count.

I can’t
tell you what happens, except there is a gore fest when Sir Jerome seizes the
audience by the throat. The vampire hunters are outside, delayed by security
guards who confiscate their crosses, because of diversity rules.

Light relief is
provided by a pop journalist, oblivious to the slaughter while he desperately
tries to think up a joke about clunk click. The vampire hunters make it to the
studio door, only to be stopped by a uniformed commissionaire with a cap badge
saying ‘Director General’.

He says there is
nothing that can be done, because nobody has made an official complaint.

All I need is
the finance to get started, and we could wrap it in three weeks. There must be
investors out there who can see what a great Christmas special it would make.

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02 October 2012 5:52 PM

The cherished certainties
upheld by our political masters and intellectual betters sometimes seem so
firmly set that they can never be altered. And then, suddenly, the wind
changes.

If you google
back a couple of years, you will turn up headlines in which Tory hero Boris
Johnson was vowing never to tolerate ‘Kosovo-style social cleansing’.

The cause
of this strong language was the Coalition’s benefit policy, introduced by Iain
Duncan Smith, which introduced the first caps on the level of means-tested
benefits people were entitled to claim. Housing Benefit was going to be limited
to £400 a week for a family, and Boris thought this would mean the eviction of
thousands.

The Mayor’s deep
feelings were undoubtedly to do with the looming 2012 London election and his
perception that less well-off voters are in love with the welfare benefits
system.

So now, not
quite two years later, we have Mr Duncan Smith’s Labour shadow Liam Byrne on
the radio, talking about Coalition plans for a national benefit cap.

How apocalyptic
do you think Mr Byrne was?

‘It would make
much more sense to have a different cap in different parts of the country,’ he
said.

Not much social
cleansing there.

How about
medical testing of people making claims for Disability Living Allowance, a
£12.6 billion a year benefit paid to those who claim an impairment or health
condition, and which, in the past, was awarded to half of all those who claimed
it without any medical check at all?

The tests need
fast reform, Mr Byrne said, because they are too bureaucratic. ‘The principle
of the test is absolutely right.’

Our politicians
seem, over a period of a few months, to have fallen out of love with the
benefits system. Mr Byrne’s view was that ‘the truth is that social security
today doesn't enjoy widespread support’.

He added: ‘For
many people in work, they don't actually feel they get much out for the
pressures that they have to contend with in everyday life.’

The BBC’s Today
Programme prefaced its Byrne interview with a few words from an apparently
randomly-selected young working class man about the benefits system, in which
he deplored large numbers of people who fail to work because they say they are
depressed or have bad backs.

The
surprise is not that you can find an ordinary person who takes this line, but
that the BBC broadcast it so prominently. The shock was as if you were
listening to searing allegations of long ago child abuse on Newsnight, and
suddenly you heard the name Jimmy Savile rather than the Roman Catholic Church.

It is not hard
to work out why our politicians are changing their minds about the benefit
system. Their polling is telling them to.

They look at
things like the British Social Attitudes survey, an annual snapshot with no
reputation for right-wing savagery, which reported last month that nearly two
thirds think benefits are too high. This ‘suggests a fundamental long-term
change in attitudes towards welfare and benefit recipients,’ researchers said.

This week Demos,
a think tank closely linked to Tony Blair in the days when Blair was ratting on
his promises to reform the welfare system, came up with the number of people
who would like to see benefit claimants issued with a spending card rather than
cash, so as to limit the things that they can buy.

Two thirds
wanted a bar on welfare money being used for gambling; half wanted a block on
claimant spending on tobacco and alcohol; just under half wanted to stop
benefit money going on branded goods like trainers; more than a third wanted to
ban spending on holidays.

Politicians
should not have needed British Social Attitudes or Demos to tell them this.
They should have looked at the government poverty figures which have showed
numbers of working people on poverty line incomes rising since 2004, long
before the recession.

They should have
realised that working families who face tough competition for jobs and decent
wages do not like paying high taxes to keep their shiftless neighbours
untroubled by the need to earn.

What they
actually did was to urge more mothers to go out to work. Then they wondered why
it wasn’t making them popular.

We now
seem to have an end to the dominating consensus, unbroken since the 1960s,
which says that welfare is a right rather than a safety net and that no-one is
out of work through their own fault.

If the
major political parties can at last summon the courage to reform the benefits
system, the rewards for the rest of us could be great.

Gordon Brown’s
tax credits, designed to persuade single mothers to work at least part time,
cost nearly £25 billion a year and serve both to depress the incomes of
everyone else and to discourage couples from living together. It is time tax credits
were questioned.

Mr Duncan Smith
is already onto the Disability Living Allowance mentioned above. The price to
the nation of that one and tax credits together would pay for David Cameron’s
high speed railway line to Birmingham, in a year.

Beyond disability
payouts, Housing Benefit costs us around £15 billion. Income Support for those
who say they cannot work, around £8 billion. Council Tax Benefit for claimants
of these, another £3 billion.

We are getting
close to the cost of building the Boris Island airport by now.

And if the
sacred cow of the benefits system turns out to be more of a dead duck, what
about other untouchable pillars of the state that are supposed to be so widely
loved that they are beyond serious reform?

Perhaps one day
politicians might start to consider how popular with their voters the NHS
really is.